Energy availability shapes biodiversity; solar radiation and water availability describes the terrestrial ecosystems well, just as sea surface temperature and nutrients availability describe marine ecosystems.At the community scale, food webs and their structures control energy exchanges from primary producers to top predators. Despite its crucial importance,the implementation of energy has been overlooked in classical theories in biogeography, which often assume species are equivalent (e.g. the Theory of Island Biogeography) or either remain too focused on the concept of the ecological niche. In order to rectify this, we develop a theory to include energy constraints to describe the distribution of biodiversity. As an illustration of the perspectives offered by this framework, we derive expected species richness and network structure along an energy gradient.
Results/Conclusions
When increasing the energy availability, we obtain a clear succession of species according to their trophic status, from the lowest trophic level on poor energy islands to the highest species when energy is abundant. This a promising avenue to predict more than a expected number of species we loss when habitat is fragmented but also their role in the ecological network. The presentation will detail this new model and discuss the main benefits of the integration of energetic constraints within a theoretical model of biogeography. We are confident that the use of this model will be proven beneficial for the integration of community ecology with biogeography, while also better parameterize species distribution models.